Explanation: A lot of Internet People say that The Incredibles is objectivist (Ayn Rand’s ideology) because the heroes fight against a revolutionary who wants to make everyone equal by giving people superpowers.
What they miss is that this “revolutionary” is a billionaire who made his fortune selling weapons to world governments under the table, and his only motivation for saying he’d sell his weapons is to make money and spite his enemy. There’s no reason to think he would follow through, and selling powers doesn’t mean everyone gets them. It means everyone with money gets them. Syndrome is proposing a world where rich people have super powers. That’s just the plot of Vampire: The Masquerade.
Syndrome is co-opting leftist rhetoric to make himself look like a hero, while not actually understanding it, because he’s not a leftist. He’s a capitalist billionaire. And the Internet People who think this movie is bad because it praises hypercapitalist ideology… fell for the capitalist’s rhetoric.
Syndrome is special. He built himself rocket boots as a ten year old. I’m a grown adult and I can’t do that! He doesn’t get his ass beat by the Omnidroid due to a specialness deficiency. He gets his ass beat because he invented an AI specifically designed to learn how to fight supers, and then had it fight him. He did a bad thing and the bad thing hurt him. He got leopard face’d. “I didn’t think leopards would eat MY face, says supervillain who trained leopards to eat faces.” There’s nobody in the movie who can solo the Omnidroid. Not Bob, not Frozone, not Syndrome. The Incredibles beat it with teamwork, love, and trust. Syndrome tells his teammate that love makes you weak and he can’t be trusted.
The counter to Syndrome’s argument is that power didn’t make him a superhero. Syndrome says “Oh, I’m real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it without your oh-so-special powers.” Syndrome thinks being a “real hero” is about being strong. Selling his technology to rich people isn’t going to turn everyone into a hero. Syndrome, and all other billionaires, are unheroic because of their awful personalities. Powers aren’t what makes the difference.
You know who doesn’t have powers and is awesome? Edna. Edna Mode is most certifiably, 100% special. And it’s all in her personality.
Edna describes her work with supers as “designing for Gods”. Again, this feeds into the underlying subtext through the film that some people are innately better than others, and should not be constrained in the same way normal people are.
She then goes on to describe how many of her “gods” were killed by their capes. The same thing that happened to Syndrome.